Flatiron School

If you are looking to start a career in Software Development do not start here! Look into other programs that teach the basics. I was informaed that Flatiron would be able to go from where I was (beginner) to being "job ready" by the end of the course... for me this was not accurate. Majority of my time was spent on Google/ Youtube trying to find tutorials or additional information to grasp a basic understanding on what they were teaching me. I asked for additional support such as a tutor/ mentor with only my confused peers to help. They do have a 'Ask a Question' ability but I question what training they have gone through becuase they were not willing/ able to explain things in a way that I understood; so why pay them? This bootcamp is for intermediate to advanced coders probably looking for the Job Assistance / wanting a cert to further the carrer that they are already in. 

I recently got into Flatiron's Engineering Immersive course. I had researched other courses and found Flatiron to be the best fit. Beware the prep work before the interview is about 100 hours. Once you pass your technical interview, which is where you show the code that you used to solve one of their labs in the interview prep work. You explain how you got that answer, and then pair code with your interviewer. They got back to me promptly that I got in. Once you get in there is another 100 hours of prep work. They said that there would be 75 hours and another 75, it took me about 50 hours more. So give yourself ample time to work through it, plus they have you figure a lot of it out to prepare you for what it is like to be a developer. They do have tutors available 10 hours a day to help you through problems so make sure that you use them! My course starts on December 9 and I am very excited. I will update this review once I complete the course.

The Data Science In-Person was really helpful. Basic to intermediate skills/knowledge are broken down chronologically and people with no background are really set up to be entry level data scientists. The career coaching, AKA job placement, looks promising with detailed support and steps to secure a job. However, for people looking to hone their skills and already at beginner to intermediate level, this is not the place to go to. You are generally looked down upon, verbatim 'None of you are marketable as data scientists' despite knowing that the cohort has 2 people with MS in Data Science, 1 graduating with MS in Data Science, and several people who have self-studied Data Science as well.

The organization's interest is not the students' best professional interest with, the exception of the instructors and coaches. The admin people are centered at making money out of you instead of ensuring quality education/learning and professional growth. Seeking Jobs while unemployed for 15 weeks is discouraged. And if you do secure a job without their assistance, they will try and get credits for it and try to make money out of it.

To Summarize, if you really are a beginner with low confidence on finding a job or networking, this school will be a good start and boost for your career. Otherwise, look somewhere else and maybe stick to self study and free online courses.

P.S. I got the boot camp for "free".

I took the online full stack web development program and had a great experience.  I was brand new to coding when I enrolled and the program and now I can say that I am a full stack web developer! In addition to a great curriculum, the people at Flatiron are absolutely amazing.  I never felt alone and was always able to find the support I needed to get through the program.  From the education coaches to the technical coaches to the career coaches, everyone was friendly, encouraging and knowledgable.  I will forever be grateful to Flatiron!

Like many others, I was very captivated by the heavy marketing campaign Flatiron school brought to the British shores. I was also tempted by their offer of 50% off for women taking the course and the fact that I could do the course online while I kept working. I was chuffed to be accepted and felt very positive after completing the bootcamp prep.

However, after two months of the course I dropped out. These are my reasons.

The "Learn" IDE platform is simply not up to scratch. The teaching is essentially, read this, then do this exercise. Looking for pre-recorded lectures on the platform was not straightforward. In addition, the lectures that do exist often have poor audio, are waffling and in desperate need of editing. The main lecturer often talks in metaphors and figurative language which is just not at all helpful for beginners who need concrete examples. 

Yes there are live lectures and workshops and other things you can join but if you don't live in America this is often impossible as they happen at 1, 2 or 3 am British time. These are often not recorded or are difficult to find. 

When I questioned the quality of some of the teaching materials on the slack channels some of the responses I had included 'we are a startup' and other excuses like 'oh I just read the docs'. I'm sorry but even with 50% off tuition, the online course came to just under £600 quid a month. These excuses just simply aren't good enough. For this much money, students should expect real teaching and not be guided towards youtube and things that they can find themselves for free or cheap online. 

The thing that I was grateful for from my experience was the fact that every exercise I did ended up on my person github and made me look extremely studious and productive. Also, I met some nice TAs online who were helpful and encouraging. However, getting to speak to one during acceptable British hours often took a long time.

I imagine that the Flatiron in-person course is what it says on the tin, but the equally expensive online course has a long way to go. If I could do it again, I wish someone had written this review for me to read and that I could have saved my hard earned money on other much better, much cheaper teaching materials. 

Participated in the first Data Science cohort. It started off strong, but quickly fell apart after the first module, when the material shifted from standard coding techniques that were adapted from the webdev course to more data/math focused topics. Our teacher was underqualified to be teaching us Data Science, and we received essentially zero feedback on our coursework throughout the 15 week program. I honestly do not believe the cirriculum was ready for launch, it felt way too rushed. Numerous topics advertised as part of the course were skipped or rushed through. Some of the labs and lectures were riddled with errors, and often we were not provided lecture notes or videos as promised. The 3rd module consisted of watching youtube videos 50% of the time - didn't really need to pay $15k for that. 

The career guidance was misleading, we were told our guidance counselor would be randomly selected, yet 10 of 12 students received the same coach. The career team always seemed like they placed their personal interests ahead of mine.

I enjoyed the culture of Flatiron School, and have nothing but the best to say about my classmates. I feel like the program was rushed, misadvertised, and did not really prepare me for a job in Data Science. 

As an aside, I recommend actually sifting through these reviews before signing up - many of them are from people who have only completed the free bootcamp prep. I was asked to write a review before starting the class but refused because I thought that was misleading.

I am a CS grad who enrolled in Flatiron School’s Online Web Development Program. If your goal is to get an overview of Computer Science topics through this program, you’ll get that. But you will need to supplement your learning with material from elsewhere to really get grounded.

That said, the team at Flatiron School has done a really good job of building a web development program that can take a student from no programming at all to building real web applications. You will Always Be Coding. And, they continue to build and adapt the program as technologies change and students share their feedback. The community is great. Supportive TAs. Useful online Study Groups. You are never alone on this journey.

I will echo my peers in saying the “job or money back guarantee” requirements are quite rigorous. It’ll help if you live in or close to a populous area. Take the advice. It works. The career coaches really know their stuff and want grads to succeed. I am closer now to my goal of a thriving dev career than I’ve ever been and I owe Flatiron School huge thanks for that.
 

This Bootcamp Preps you for admission to the "Data Science" course.

Basically it gave me an idea of what i would need to know before i took the plunge.

-- Basic Python, Plotting graphs etc.

-- Derivatives, linear equations, etc.

I was amazed with how powerful and easy it was to work with python, using open source libraries.

Also helped me brush up on Middle/high School math.

I did not need to interact with the instructors.

The piece missing was the instructions to setup python, which i was able to do search online easily.

You need to know how to interact with GIT to download solutions.

I simply had an amazing experience at the Flatiron School. I had recently graduated from an art school where I had developed a passion for programming. While I was able to pick up some fundamentals on my own, there was still a lot to know to be able to work in the industry. I had a lot of doubts that someone from a non-technical background would be able to land a job as a Software Engineer. Flatiron seems to be churning out a ton of great entry level engineers at an unbelievable pace.

My favorite thing about the program was the people. The backgrounds in my cohort seemed to be CS, engineering, finance, and art/music. I was pleased to meet a few other musicians had been admitted to the program. To my delight, the musicians in the cohort seemed to be some of the best programmers! I can honestly say that the people I met at Flatiron are some of the smartest people I've ever known. I definitely felt like the dumbest person in the room (this is a good thing) and I've heard people way smarter than I say this too. 

The curriculum moved pretty fast. If you were able to get through the interview and prework process, you should be fine. The first few weeks were pretty stressful. "Bootcamp" is a truly apt name for a program like this. The program is stressful enough to warrant a weekly "Feelings Friday" where everybody sits around a circle and talks about their feelings. Towards the beginning of the program, there were a lot of feelings, but by the end, everybody seemed to have adjusted to the intensity, and gained confidence making the sessions much shorter. The most common feeling expressed was something along the lines of "yeah I have no idea what's going on, but I'm going to trust the process". The information can be complex and come at a pretty high velocity and it seems like most people don't completely understand after completing the readings and going through the labs. By the end of the module, everybody absorbs the information through a combination of the readings, lectures, pair programming labs, and projects. For me, I only actually learned the material by discussing it, so pair programming and projects ended up being the most valuable part of the curriculum for me. 

After the program, Flatiron provides a huge amount of support. I met with my career coach weekly to share my progress and revel in my wins and mourn many losses. Be warned: the job hunt is not for the faint of heart! You're competing with everybody in your cohort, everybody in the other cohorts, everybody from the other programs in the city, and the sought after CS majors from elite universities. If you went to a great school or have a technical background, you will probably be fine. If not, you're most likely going to be an underdog. The business development team at Flatiron does an incredible job of setting up interviews with students. At one point, I was doing 3 interviews a week scheduled for me by BD. This was almost worth the price of the program itself. Every job gets thousands of resumes from Bootcamp grads and most of them look identical to employers. It's really hard to make it beyond the first stage so having the interviews set up for you is really nice. I ended up interviewing at amazing companies: JP Morgan, WeWork, BounceX and many many more. I eventually got an amazing job offer that came through BD. 

Overall it was a great experience. I would highly recommend it to anybody who is willing to put in the hard work required before, during, and after the program.